Information Policy Stats Are smart cities the key to resilience? The word ‘rebuild’ has been the focal point of a lot of discussions around recovery. How can we rebuild our place economies back to pre-pandemic levels? How can we rebuild the footfall to our city centres? And how can we do this so that our places are more resilient against future shocks? The smartest response isn’t to just recreate the same processes as we were used to pre-pandemic, but to understand how we can refine and improve our everyday ‘normal’. The pandemic has exposed our weaknesses and now we need to ensure that we address these in order to be more resilient against future shocks.